RETURNING
Eventually it was time for me to leave, but even as I boarded my outbound flight from Kinshasa, I was already planning my return. I was heading to London, where I would begin doctoral research under the supervision of Dr. Zoë Marriage at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Zoë quickly became my guiding light, and with her I began sorting through my experiences in the DRC, trying to make some theoretical sense out of what I had seen and lived. Many of my early hours with Zoë involved her listening deeply and questioning patiently. From my mind-set of impassioned reactivity—This is terrible! We must do something!—she steered me toward a more reflective mode that would instead wonder: Interesting, why does this keep happening?
I considered the questions I wanted to answer and then elaborated the research methods that would guide my fieldwork. I immersed myself in the literatures of anthropology, political economy, psychology, and sociology as they related to violence across time and geographic space. I was influenced especially by the ethnographic work of Philippe Bourgois, who showed through his research—decades earlier and continents away—that violence does not simply disappear, is not merely survived, but is transformed and incorporated into our ways of perceiving, being in, and re-creating the world.6 Eventually I decided that the goal of my research would be to understand young people’s experiences not just of the terrible violences of war but also of their everydays, of their processes of coping and ways of simply getting on with life, despite the violence everywhere around them.
Over the course of the following decade, I would return to the DRC in varying professional and research capacities. In 2009, I served with the UN Security Council–mandated Group of Experts on the DRC to support investigations into grave human rights violations.7 Beginning in late 2009, my focus turned to ethnographic research with young people. I alternated between periods of fieldwork as a student and—to pay for my studies—as a researcher commissioned by various international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), including Save the Children UK, War Child Holland and War Child UK, and Oxfam GB. Later, I would travel to the DRC as a researcher with the Small Arms Survey, and then for the USAID–Education in Crisis and Conflict Network.
Throughout, I relied primarily on qualitative research methods, including interviews, group discussions, and participant observation. My priority was to ensure that the research could be safely conducted while creating as few risks as possible to my research participants and collaborators. In those years foreign researchers were rarely targeted or attacked in the DRC (regrettably, this is no longer the case), yet the participants or the individuals supporting me could have been threatened. I carefully weighed the risks and anticipated harms involved with the research and anchored my methods not only in the Ethical Guidelines for Good Research Practice of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and the Commonwealth but also in international child protection standards and guidelines specific to conducting research with children in contexts of violent conflict.8
Between 2006 and 2016, approximately two thousand people directly informed this research.9 They came from villages and cities throughout the Kivus, Orientale, or Maniema or else lived in Kinshasa and neighboring Rwanda. They included young people, their parents, local leaders, religious actors, military commanders, demobilized soldiers, government authorities, and my professional colleagues. These individuals were the vital force that drove my research; their narratives form the cornerstone of this book.
My extended period of fieldwork and repeat visits to the DRC provided me the opportunity to conduct truly grounded research. Multiple phases of fieldwork spread over several years allowed me to fully engage with the relevant theoretical literatures across disciplines and to then weave this theory back into the experiences of life in the DRC. Some of my young Congolese research participants were eager to engage with and challenge the concepts and theoretical constructs that I would bring back to them. As such, this book documents an iterative and organic process of theory influencing my understanding of violence influencing my engagement with theory, and on it continues.10
The insights and knowledge provided by my Congolese research participants continue to infuse my ongoing work with young people far beyond the DRC. My theoretical engagement with Pierre Bourdieu’s law of conservation of violence—which examines how violence is reproduced through social, political, economic, cultural, and historic structures—influences my current research with young people not only in other conflict settings but also on the margins of European society today.11 By tracing trajectories of violence, and by considering the pathways through which violence is conserved by society and by individuals, it becomes possible to see how, for example, ongoing conflict and adversity lead to migration outflows, which lead to populist fear-based political rhetoric in destination countries, which leads to exclusion, which leads to deeper inequalities, which lead to continuing violence. And on it can go without end.
TRANSFORMING VIOLENCE?
Like electricity, violence follows the path of least resistance, transmitted not only in the relationships between people and their immediate social structures, from one person to the next, from one generation to the next, but also through the global economic systems in which we are all embedded. According to Bourdieu, as long as the social, political, and economic structures that are conducive to violence remain in place, violence will be conserved. However, Bourdieu’s metaphor also offers us the conceptual possibility of a different kind of outcome. If electricity can be transformed, then what would be the individual, social, political, and economic changes required to transform the structures perpetuating such terrible human suffering toward ends that are peaceful, dignified, and humane?
It is to contribute to such processes of transformation that I have written this book. My initial aim had been to share with global audiences—to “make explicit”—the experiences of young Congolese people so that others might also learn from and be inspired by their strength, courage, and capacities to survive.12 However, the case study of the DRC also presents empirical evidence on how good-willed international interventions are not adequately responding to the needs of people they claim—indeed exist—to protect. The narratives in this book elucidate some of the individual and social experiences with and impacts of international interventions. They beg reflection on the possibility that such interventions may be contributing to greater harms in the DRC by obscuring the complexities and rootedness of violence. Such obscuration—clad in aid projects and donor funding appeals—precludes the clear analyses and effective collective action that would be needed to deconstruct the systemic inequality and injustice that perpetuate violence in the DRC and beyond.
I am aware that such a critique is hazardous in an era when political cynicism is deepening and when populist rhetoric is increasingly used to mobilize fear and to attribute blame for adversity and hardship. Providing evidence of the failures of current international protection efforts may risk buttressing the political proponents of harsher and more insular policies. Yet, as taught by the eighth-century Buddhist scholar Shantideva, ours is an interdependent existence—any of the most pressing issues facing our world today serve as testimony to this old wisdom. It is increasingly undeniable that sooner or later we will face the consequences of our actions and nonactions in perpetuating or transforming violence.
Rather than pandering to cynical interests, this book is intended as an offering to honest debate and critical reflection among the researchers, students, practitioners, and policy makers who are concerned with—and in many cases devoting their lives to—redressing the global injustices of our times. In anticipation of possible frustration among readers, I disclaim from the outset that this book does not offer solutions to end violence in the DRC. As the following chapters will show, the DRC has been the “beneficiary” of many decades of exogenously imposed “solutions.” Based on my experience, the inefficacy of international protection responses is at least in part due to the implementation of simple and technical responses that insufficiently account for, or even understand, the historical depths of violence, its pervasiveness throughout Congolese society, and its intimate linkage and interdependence
